because i thought it was great you said the fact is that every single day the agents of foreign governments are working to undermine u.s. foreign policy the auction is always open the only question is what country is buying your government today but who are the major players undermining u.s. foreign policy today it's all the players you wouldn't hope to see it's your libya egypt senate and it's not just the countries it's the it's the people in the dictators in those countries that are hiring our lobbyists are hiring our public relations firms so mubarak's egypt features prominently in my book khadafi features prominently in my book syria is in the book all of these people who most americans when they think of foreign policy they think well who are the real bogeyman out there iran even has foreign lobbyists working in the u.s. and so when you whenever you think who is the sort of bad guys are in the world chances are they've got a lobbyist fighting for them right now. you know i didn't even know that this was

happening to the extent that you really lay out it was really shocking for me i mean this is not legal i mean what are these legal cobbett that cobbett that people are going through to do this yeah unfortunately in our current system it's perfectly legal if you're a foreign government you're prohibited from making campaign contributions so you can directly donate money to u.s. elections however there's a really big loophole you could simply hire a lobbyist hire a public relations for as long as that person is a u.s. citizen they're free to make all the contributions they want within the legal limits but what happens all too often what i found in the book was that walk into a congressman's office there say hey i'm here on behalf of libya here on behalf of gadhafi or mubarak and they'll have a conversation about what they want done that very same day they'll write a check the write a thousand dollars two thousand dollars check and what's worse the bundle that contribution with other people from their firm so not only will they write a two thousand dollars check they'll have other people at their firm eight thousand dollars checks two thousand dollars checks five hundred dollars checks so by the

end of the day after one meeting one congressman has a few thousand dollars because that money come directly from the dictator no but is that money ultimately coming from the dictator i think so unbelievable do we know any specific legislation or is it just kind of speculated that you know it's just so massively influence that. that basically legislation that we have toward libya syria all these countries is coming in from the influence the sphere of influence in that there's a lot of specific legislation one that really comes to mind for me is the example of egypt we're all familiar with the revolution that happened there what a lot of people don't know is that we had lawmakers who saw that coming mccain and feingold but best known for campaign finance reform a few months before the revolution broke out there they saw it coming and they said hey we're going to introduce legislation to call out mubarak for all these human rights violations for everything he's doing to suppress his people well obviously the egyptian government wasn't too happy with that so what they had their lobbyist do they had them stifle that legislation i had. document a great case of how foreign lobbyists are able to really squelch good legislation

right but just a month before the revolution broke out there now how might things have been different if we had said to the egyptian people hey we're on your side we understand this is a bad guy and we here we put it on record we support you unfortunately will never know because of foreign law and it just all the rhetoric that we hear about foreign policy just really becomes kind of the norm void when you when you know the underlying underhanded things that are going on ben i want to talk about think tanks for the quickly the atlantic council build a bridge trilateral commission all these think tanks that have foreign policy prescriptions that they recommended the government sometimes put into place and we see foreign heads of state c.e.o.'s corporate board members as well as government officials sitting on these boards how do you think tanks play a role in what you're talking about here they play a very important role in them and what we're seeing from think tanks more and more as you're having much more of an international influence on those think tanks like you mentioned and it's an interesting sort of hybrid area because are they

technically government entities well no so do they have to register as foreign agents most people don't think so and so if you don't have to register as a foreign agent well the reporting requirements are a lot less stringent so unfortunately we know even less about what these folks are doing then those people who do have to register as for a lobbyist so it's really it's an even greater area than what i focus a lot of my attention and i think it's going to be a much more important area going forward for foreign policy certainly and are trying with the whole situation let's talk about oversight where is it it's unfortunately it's virtually nonexistent. it's technically within the department of justice the department of justice has as a unit called the foreign agents registration unit it's filled with wonderful people who are who are working their heart out to try and oversee this this half a billion dollar industry every year five hundred million dollars spent on for not being in the u.s. yet we've got about a dozen people who are actually conducting meaningful oversight of. so it's impossible to fully track everybody who's registered let alone everybody who

doesn't register and so what we know unfortunately is frightening but what's what what we don't know that's what's really scary how many people are not registering how many people are in filing that should be you know how many other you know iranians and north korea and what whatever country that might scare you how many of their agents are working here in the u.s. and we just simply don't know about it right and you say fewer than ten people monitor the foreign lobbying for the u.s. government very shocking bad let's talk about the media blackout i mean this issue gets virtually no attention as we know bahrain it pays lobbying firms to pretty much advocate by proxy to bolster their image through agencies like c.n.n. i mean how does this shape the media narrative when we have this kind of underhanded tactics going on for the corporate press and how is this a find out that this is going on really do anything about it yeah that's what really shocked me when i first set out to write the book i was so baffled that the

media had ignored this for so long that's why i was very happy for our team to have me on of course. but the real shocking thing is that you have an issue in a nation that was founded on resistance to foreign influence as has absolutely turned a blind eye to this foreign influence this foreign money we have pouring into our elections and just somehow we don't care about it in you see in the media a lot of the money these firms spend at least countries these dictators spit is on public relations it's trying to convince everybody in the u.s. oh hey i'm not a bad dictator i'm actually a good guy forget about all those human rights violations forget about all that torture stuff and it really changes the public perception here and it's so unfortunate because we're ignoring a lot of the suffering that's going on in the world and we're undermining our own influence in the world now we've probably going on way more than we do know by proxy through these agencies and it really reminds me of you know as you just said where the good kind of dictator where the dictator that works with you we put up this positive in. image of ourselves and reminds me of the emmy day the state

department to remove the emmy came from the terrorism list and then we have hamas the democratically elected leadership of palestine what is going on with that i mean it just seems like we throw around this is the good kind of tears because it could potentially undermine the iranian regime these are the bad kind of terrorist talk a lot more of the emmy and how you talk about that if you make a is a great example and i think it really goes back to the to a precedent that was set by gadhafi and his foreign lobby so in the middle of the war on terror gadhafi is considered the number two terrorist in the entire world for the u.s. and so how does that person consider the number two terrorist has killed u.s. citizens has he been killed u.s. soldiers in terrorist attacks suddenly in the middle of the war on terror gets pardon how does that happen for a lobby how does that happen money campaign contributions niemi k. basically took that script and they said what what i get off you that was successful he started lobbying aggressively they took some other steps to it's impossible to discount those but the emmy winner in a very aggressive lobbying campaign and within just

a couple of years was successful gets taken off the terrorist watch list suddenly and this is a group that we do know committed terrorist acts what will we know for a fact that they did and so you see the power of lobbying when you see these cases like the unique a like elected office in libya it really can fundamentally change the way that we perceive foreign policy and it can change outcomes and they're not always for the good regardless of what you think about the in the u.k. this was not the decision we had before that lobbying effort started and it's bipartisan i mean we saw howard dean john boehner i mean all these people tens of thousands of dollars lobbied by the i mean ted to speak on behalf of them really goes all across the board and it really makes the rhetoric meaningless when you see the amount of money being funneled into shape the narrative ben freeman thank you so much extremely important everyone check out the book thanks for coming on thank you very much. so if you like what you see so far go to our you tube channel at youtube dot com plus breaking the set and subscribe check out our facebook page at facebook dot com slash for. in the set you know the nature of the internet is that

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so two stories of dominating the mainstream media post-election on one hand we've got the betrayal resignation love triangle story changing by the day and on the other hand there's the fiscal cliff let's look at the latter. returned to work to did and what the upcoming holidays there are just weeks to negotiate a budget deal to avoid this proverbial fiscal cliff that's the package a big tax increases and budget cuts that take effect automatically at the end of this year congress and the white house can come up with

a compromise on the federal budget the u.s. is facing more than sixteen trillion dollars in debt right now there seems to be no plan a cogent want to point to move forward on all of that sort of breakdown exactly what this cliff entails and what it means for you and me joining me is lauren lyster host of couple account right here on r t yeah thanks for having me on your show i mean you so i don't think a lot of people understand all this rhetoric of course economics there's a lot of talk about a social is was the right there including myself i don't really understand exactly is that this could you just explain in layman's terms of course so the fiscal cliff is kind of the culmination of a few different things that are that are all going to be happening around the beginning of the year in january so we have the expiration of the bush tax cuts so those are set to expire and this is at the same time that the spending cuts from this sequester ation which is just however it was described when that debt ceiling deal was agreed upon last summer in two thousand and eleven it was the punishment

for that deficit commission not being able to come up with cuts so this was what was triggered so those go into effect at the same time in january so it's the culmination of these couple of different things being the major things also some other tax cuts are expiring there was a payroll tax holiday that's one of its expiring and a couple a bunch of other things actually but the main ones are the bush tax cuts and to see question spending cuts all coming together at the same time which is making peace. oh this is going to be horrible for economic growth and for jobs because these things are all coming together at once and there is the haphazard nature of just these you know punishment spending cuts that some are concerned about you know they would like a more targeted way to cut government spending it's questionable whether that's ever achieved. but that's kind of the nuts and bolts of what's in the fiscal cliff so what does this mean for government there's all this is kind of colliding all what exactly are they cutting i mean are they cutting all across the border there

in favoring one sector of the other with the cuts talk a little bit so the sequester cuts were one point two trillion dollars over ten years. we know that the government runs trillion plus deficit so you so you know what you know that's one of those in ten years so it's not that significant so it amounts to one hundred ten billion dollars each year and the reason it doesn't add up perfectly is because interest counts not one point two trillion dollars savings interest payments to cuts to them so the sequester and the downpayment will pay on it for two thousand and thirteen is one hundred ten billion dollars fifty five billion about from defense fifty five billion from non-defense and your question about across the board these are supposed to be across the board proportional cuts or caps however there are exemptions i should note medicaid food stamps child nutrition social security which is like disability refundable tax credits earned income tax credit benefits and are also examples all of those are exempt those

don't get touched so what about defense spending i mean that we could just cut it all from there. you are not going to get me to disagree with you there of course i mean defense i believe and i think that there's lots of support this is so bloated you know with government asking for things lawmakers asking for things that the military doesn't even say that they need i mean i think that there is a strong argument to be made about that of course so how is this going to really i mean you say people are going to freak you know. about you know what is this going to do to hold the growth of the economy is this really going to impact you me everyone else citizens and what come through some of that yeah ok so let's talk about first what it means to you or i is just people if the if the government goes off the fiscal cliff so to speak that means bush tax cuts expire that means people's taxes go up so three to five percent depending on the income tax bracket that you're in so your taxes will go up what it means for the payroll tax if that expires so that's been do remember when obama gave those speeches what would you do with forty dollars extra in your paid in your paycheck well that was when he was

lobbying for the payroll tax holiday so that lowered a little bit that expires so for the average person forty bucks more taken out of their paycheck so so that's kind of what it means to you or i just in terms of taxes if we go on in terms of what this means for the economy if we do this series of things all at once which are contractionary projections are that we could go back into recession that's what the c.b.i. just recently said that next year we would go back into recession unemployment to rise to nine point one percent remind you live in your mind these are all projection by the congressional budget office is not by any means if and it and so that would be the pain felt however they also found that longer term this would actually be better for growth and better for joblessness because you are actually kind of getting a fiscal deficit more of the budget deficit if the fiscal cliff was not a verted so to speak we would see five hundred billion dollars less added to the federal budget deficit next year even less the following year so there's

a silver lining isn't this just going to put in a band-aid on a more deep seated issue here we're in a debt based economy that's really unsustainable in the long run i mean. of course i'm on. yeah i mean there's like a couple things so even if there is a grand bargain or we go off the fiscal cliff and these are just such small things we're talking about one hundred ten billion dollars in sequester each year we're running up one point whatever trillion dollar deficit so. this is really a drop in the bucket and in addition there are these other things that play again for example why is the government borrowing so much what enables this well the federal reserve policy with interest rates being so low that helps the government finance its debts and deficits and it ever lower amounts i mean interest payments on the debt are actually lower than they were a few years ago because of how low interest payments are ever excuse me interest rates are so yes there are all these dynamics going on and lots of issues that go

beyond just this of course which is what you get into and just seems like you know obama is out there bragging about how we're not going to cut defense we're going to raise defense year after year it's just it just makes this all kind of meaningless when you see that they're really not going to plan to cut this bloated defense budget. really where people need it the most but let's talk let's rolling jubilee this new occupy wall street effort to absolve can you explain exactly will this work lauren break this down really quickly for us ok so how it works is that some banks some lenders they will sell bundles of distressed debt so debts that their customers that borrow the money haven't been paying on maybe these banks and lenders want to write it down as a loss get it off their books so they will sell it at a discount to pay for pennies on the dollar to debt collectors so they can collect on the debts and maybe they'll make some money enough to recoup this great discount that they got on this debt and that's something that goes on so occupy wall street is that hey we're going to raise money by some of the distress debt at pennies on

the dollar and we're going to just forget it instead of recouping not that there is debt payments and harassing people we're going to forgive this debt and it's going to be a debt jubilee they're trying to raise i think fifty thousand dollars to forgive a million dollars worth of done so does it work it depends on what your what you consider working i mean people are two point seven trillion dollars in debt in this country so a million dollars is a very small drop in the bucket there. the larger the store for something that could be feasible i think that it's not something that could be feasible super broadly but i think as what it means of ball oakley i think it's really awesome because i feel like it's a private solution a private sector solution to something that is a really difficult thing and people always look to the government it was the government going to do it like forget about it you know you know they're not going to you're going to absolve yeah yeah so i just like that they're taking matters into their own hands and doing this but big picture i mean what is this economy

fueled on consumer spending what do we continue to hear from politicians all consumer confidence is up consumers are spending again we need to get consumers out spending again what does that mean taking on board debt so that they can spend more to fuel this condom economy and to be more indebted i mean it's the same pattern that's not getting broken or changed or deficits are absolutely you're broken down a little more lower in a looser couple come. guys when this country was founded a set of values and hair only american values were stablished above all things that was irrefutable that all men are created equal whether or not people adhere to the principles of different story. yes a few of the signers of the declaration of independence were slave owners and yes women did not have the right to vote and yes for years and years of racism was the

norm but that was over two hundred years ago and we still haven't reached the point where everyone respects these fundamental values of life liberty and the pursuit of happiness for all there been a few monumental shifts in consciousness in this country that have brought us to where we are today and it goes back to slavery which is about as polarizing of an issue as you could have in the us ultimately it led to a civil war and slavery wasn't even truly abolished until decades later african-americans had to wait more than a century before seeing changes under federal law that gave them the same rights as white people and for crying out loud it has even been a century since women have had the right to vote in this country the point i'm trying to make here is that social movements have never come without a fight and as we know change is rarely institutionalized from the top down without a grassroots struggle take a look at this wood carving it depicts woman voting in the territory of wyoming and

eight hundred sixty nine that's fifty years before the federal government adopted the nineteenth amendment to the constitution granting women's suffrage in the same way that wyoming led the charge and what was right as of november sixth there are nine states that have now legalized same sex marriage but there are also this many states that have either outright banned it or have taken action to allow it to be banned earlier this year obama became the first sitting president to vocalize support for same sex marriage. the certain point i've just concluded that. for me personally. it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that i think same sex couples should be able to get married. yes i know this is just rhetoric but at the end of the day it is monumental for a sitting president to make such a. some gesture for gay rights in a country that is so heavily divided over the issue still and you know what it's

about time because they finally caught up to where former vice president dick cheney was years ago check it out. many of you know one of my daughters is gay and something that. we've lived with for a long time in our family. i think people ought to be free to enter into any kind of union they wish and you know it's really interesting that a lot of vitriolic anti-gay sentiment in this country comes from a place of fear a fear of the unknown a fear of what you don't understand until you are personally in or twine with someone that you love and care about who is facing this discrimination that fear will reign supreme it's funny the same fear lead some of the most vocal opponents of the l g b t rights to suppress their own gay desires as we've seen with public figures like alabama attorney general troy king our new life church pastor ted haggard or california state senator roy ashburn just to name

a few their folks this most recent election has probably been the most profound victory for l.g.b. rights thus far arizona has just announced the winner of the state's ninth congressional district race kirsten sinema making her the first openly bisexual individual to be elected to congress and the seventh openly team member serving in the house and our time the dialogue about civil rights is being redefined the fight is no longer about the right to vote for asking for integration nonetheless it is about equality and it is about the pursuit of happiness l g b t rights is the civil rights issue of our time and as hard as it may be for some of you to accept this is the new normal look guys the youth is leading the charge in shaping the cultural fabric. this country two thousand and ten polls show that same sex marriage in america has reached majority support and in the three states that legalized same

sex marriage on november sixth an overwhelming majority of young people voted for it a huge change from fifteen years ago when congress passed a large and popular defense of marriage act if you only know anyone that gay like i do you know that it's not a choice and if you're blinded to this reality and if you choose to fight a losing battle then you my friend are standing on the wrong side of history. resistance is not the politics but our culture. is couldn't just. sign on its own.

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play play a. clip. you know sometimes you see a story and it seems so for langley you think you understand it and then you glimpse something else and you hear or see some other part of it and realized everything you thought you knew you don't know what i'm tom harpur welcome to the big picture.